Mohamed Mahmoud

Mohamed Mahmoud (18 June 1985-28 November 2018), also known as Abu Usama al-Gharib, was an Austrian senior Islamic State leader.

Biography
Mohamed Mahmoud was born in Vienna, Austria in 1985, the son of an exiled Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leader. In 2002, he traveled to Iraq via Italy and was trained at an Ansar al-Islam camp in Iraqi Kurdistan, and, in 2005, he started the "Organization of the Islamic Youth" in Austria. By late 2006, he worked for al-Qaeda's media wing and translated videos from Arabic to German, and he called on Muslims to boycott the 2006 legislative elections. In 2007, he was arrested for buying materials to make a suicide belt and for threatening to carry out attacks in Germany and Austria if they did not end their participations in the Afghanistan War. He was relesed on 15 September 2011 and moved to Berlin and then to Solingen, where he befriended Denis Cuspert. In 2012, he was expelled from Germany to Egypt, and, in March 2013, he burned his Austrian passport and threatened terrorist attacks. A few days later, he was arrested in Hatay, Turkey while attempting to join the struggle in the Syrian Civil War, but he was released on 19 August 2014 and ordered to report to the police regularly. He ignored this restriction and continued on to Syria, and he joined the Islamic State and became one of its most prominent German-language recruiters. In August 2015, he took part in the filmed executions of captured Syrian Arab Army soldiers at Palmyra. In 2018, he was detained by IS for breaking ranks and sowing sedition, and he was killed in a Coalition airstrike on the prison on 28 November 2018.